September 12 to October 27, 2018
60 East 66th Street, between Madison and Park avenues
New York City, booksteinprojects.com

Commuting between studios in New York City and up along the Hudson, Elena Sisto has adjusted her paintings to a wider setting. Having focused previously on intimate studio scenes depicting young women painters in fragmentary close-ups, she now incorporates elements of the natural world and glimpses, as though in transit, of urban and rural landscapes. But the new works on view in As We Dream at Bookstein Projects remain firmly rooted in her personal space. Indeed, while they reflect the new ecology of her expanded studio, these unconventional self-portraits involve a heightened self-awareness, an evolving consciousness of the fragile boundaries of nature, self, and the built environment.

With no history of working from landscape, Sisto can note, as though for the first time, the intrusion of an insect, or the distraction of a flower. Virtuosic in her detailed rendering of clothing, hands and heads, she now confronts a new ecology of signs. Long devoted to cartoons and to la pittura metafisica (and an early fan of Hilma af Klint), Sisto can bring a sense of childhood wonder to the shadow of a wasp on a bare canvas. The touch of her brush takes on metaphysical implications as conventions of shading and outlining assume abstracted forms, generating symbolic images of leaves and flowers in her garden, where a pond outlined in decorative zigzags inevitably recalls the artifice of Giverny.

As if to extend this metaphysical invocation of Impressionism, Sisto’s self-portraits assume vivid new colors, as though some light attuned to emotional temperature were suddenly turned on. Impressionistic not only in their brilliance and complementary color contrasts, the heads in her portraits are calligraphic, suggestively ephemeral, like the play of emotion itself. While fugitive, their faces are placed at a greater subjective distance than the previous, more naturalistic ones. Vagabond (for Agnes Varda) (2018) alludes to the unconventional film director of Faces, Places (2017); Sisto invokes the cinematic gaze, which here is objectified in the profile views of Vagabond and Mister Moonlight (2018). Sisto’s subjects don’t meet our eyes, or do so only with the confrontational, sun-shaded ones of Orange Field (2018). The deep purple of that face, the orange of Vagabond, or the green of Spirited Away (2018), where even Nancy, a familiar cartoon surrogate from Sisto’s earliest works, returns in lime green – a vehicle for more complex, adult emotions that now include estrangement – suggest that much more is going on here than in the studio paintings. Enhanced luminosity evokes exposure and vulnerability, an uneasy undertow of ecological and sexual forces, which Sisto associates throughout with exaggerated masses of hair. Emblematic of femininity, these also recall Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings of storms and floods. Sisto finds ironic humor in the way natural disasters, and the stark realities of sexual politics, compete for attention with preoccupations with fashion.

Hair overflows in Rapunella (2018), around a dark tower that invokes the genius of Philip Guston. His light bulb hangs in Rapunzel’s high window in an apparently empty studio, along with a blank canvas. Its orange glow extends into the sky outside, over churning coils of hair that press the boundaries of the frame. Alluding to the sublime, Sisto combines Guston’s cartoon-like simplification with intimations of apocalypse. The coils end with a whimsical flip, aligned with the canvas and bulb. Exiled from the sanctuary of the studio – like Guston under Nixon – Sisto upholds its formal ideals as a beacon for troubled times.

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March 23 to May 13, 2017 (extended)
West 26th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, thomaserben.com

Dona Nelson’s new works excite not just with their vigorous improvisation and inventive use of materials but with a new interactivity among the paintings themselves. After deconstructing conventional painting with her two-sided, free-standing canvases, Nelson has pursued an investigation of painting as a material surface, as a subject in its own right. Previously, she has compared her two-sided paintings to figures, because of their assertion of presence in the gallery. Now, by literally depicting figures in her new works, she re-emphasizes their participation in an interplay of posing and composing that integrates painting into everyday life. The exhibition’s title refers not to the models she depicts but to the fashion models photographed in front of Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings in a famous 1951 spread from Vogue, which in retrospect prefigures art’s shift away from painting, from the individual work to the interactive space of the gallery. As Nelson revisits that moment of tension, her new works stubbornly resist any reduction to decorative backdrops.

In the 1950s, Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica sought to make paintings more participatory by setting them apart from the wall as free-standing or hanging objects, which later grew into containers viewers could enter – not too different from the combined, free-standing panels of Nelson’s new work. While Oiticica used solid, monochrome panels, Nelson employs a material vernacular all her own: poured paint and gels, cheesecloth collage, and stitching with colored strings, all set within a formal syntax that exploits the interaction of front and back. Her works operate like cell membranes; stains permeate them, but with strong distinctions of inside and out, as in Lavender Lion (2016), where improvisatory pourings of green and purple seep through into a cheese-cloth reinforced grid on the opposite side. Across from it, Hägar (2017), mounted on the wall, echoes its grid and sustains the dialogue between structure and random process. Its squares of fabric are filled with stitches of colored strings that hang out the back and down the wall behind it, suggesting a hidden interior. Alluding to the cartoon character Hagar the Horrible, it recalls the anthropomorphic objects of Eva Hesse and the deconstructed paintings of other post-minimalists like Alvin Loving and Alan Shields.

Nelson herself begins her works from models in the yard outside her studio, on large, vertical panels, which offer an architectural frame for the figure. Standing figures in Platform (2017) are directly identified with their vertical panels, like archaic architectural reliefs, solidly anchored in the interactive gallery space. The more crisply detailed seated figures seem directly observed, like Autumn Andrew (2016), or the man with sunglasses in Passengers (2016), as does the delicately shaded bearded figure who emerges behind them in both panels. Softer forms, recalling Claes Oldenburg’s early work, take over in further iterations of these figures on other panels: in the parallel walls of Passengers, the seated figure recurs, once abstracted in colored shapes and again freely formed from gel-infused cheesecloth, set across from a standing figure made from sheets of fabric. Combined in pairs, the works offer no overall view but rather a cinematic montage. Nelson generates the sort of casual interactivity and distracted attention we encounter on our daily commutes. She immerses herself as well, painting her model in Passengers from within the narrow corridor between the two canvases, like a contemporary cave painter. Confined like her within our frontally oriented heads, we navigate around the paintings, trying to remember images from the opposite sides.

Nelson includes an early painting, Cold Busy Street (1984), to recall her earlier work from the figure; its densely compressed, erratically cropped fragments prefigure the abrupt juxtapositions of the new work. Although Autumn Andrew (2016) might recall American Gothic, Nelson is more indebted to Bonnard’s eccentric compositions, and to the early influence of abstract painter Myron Stout’s tautly balanced positive and negative shapes, than to Grant Wood’s frontal rigidity. Nonetheless, her emphasis on materials partakes of a stolid, Midwestern pragmatism that does indeed connect with Wood. The seated figure actually derives from another early influence, Cézanne’s full-scale portrait of his father reading the newspaper. This recalcitrant work, built out of thickly applied paint and depicting the man who opposed Cézanne’s study of art, represents the sort of primitive realism that defines Nelson’s modernist stance. Cézanne’s father reappears, quoted more specifically in distant views, in By the Yard (2016), a more pictorial composition in which stitched strings portray tree branches, and the portrait’s material density also seems to inform that of the monumental standing woman in Mountain Passengers (2017). Although probably painted from life, the figure in profile might nonetheless serve as an image of the artist herself, inserted into the everyday context in a spirit of participation in the gallery experience. Dona Nelson came to New York City fifty years ago; as the only woman in the Whitney Program, she learned early on to take a broad perspective and cultivate an independent path, and she continues to inspire reflection on painting’s long history with walls.

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Tierney: September 8 – October 22, 2016
540 West 28th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, info@cristintierney.com

Donahue: September 8 – November 6, 2016
99 Bowery, 2nd Floor, between Hester and Grand streets
New York City, info@bridgetdonahue.nyc

In his deliberately paced digital projections, Victor Burgin encourages us to meditate on the places he documents as well as on larger questions of vision and language. Involved in the early development of conceptual art, Burgin takes a methodical, analytical approach, alerting us to the way our minds make sense of experience. Seated in imposing white leather chairs, participants are encouraged to engage in the sort of “bricolage” that anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss finds at work in the creation of myths. As small text panels on black backgrounds describe unseen photographs or list names of plants, prompting us to generate our own pictures, images—sometimes animated, often inscrutable—alternate with the texts, appealing for interpretation in words. The dissolving of one panel into the next suggests movement, but these loops go nowhere. Instead, they encourage prolonged viewing and continued reflection on the histories they deploy.

This meditative stance contrasts with that of Burgin’s early series, UK76 (1976), which is currently on view at Bridget Donahue. It adopts the “loud” rhetoric of publicity to drive home the disparities of class in Great Britain. Commissioned by a labor group, Burgin photographed everyday scenes, using dramatic lighting and camera angles to link documentary realism to the theatricality of advertising. Text, often quoted from popular publications, is directly superimposed on the photographs, which are pasted like posters to the gallery walls. US 77, a follow-up project made in America, focuses on pictures used in advertisements. Drawing on writings of Guy Debord and Roland Barthes to examine the allusions and myths at work in figures like the Marlboro Man, it too is on view right now, in “Then and Now”, at Philadelphia’s Slought Foundation.

By displaying text and image separately in the new works, Burgin fosters engagement over time and more sustained probing of layered meanings. The measured intervals, like the turning of pages, create open space that sets up a context for reflection. Two recent digital projections at Cristin Tierney, Prairie and Mirror Lake, focus on the history of architectural sites near Chicago. Design, both as it penetrates the natural world and as it transforms the environments we inhabit, is a central theme, embodied in these tightly edited projections. While nonlinear in organization, they establish a historical axis by acknowledging the Native Americans forcibly displaced from both sites, and their lost languages (internalized models of the world) whose loss resonates with Burgin’s emphasis on communal constructions of meaning.

Prairie is particularly stark. It establishes no sense of place, just a self-enclosed, monochromatic space, animated only by the occasional play of light across a blank wall or section of ornamental ironwork. Texts recount the destruction of Chicago’s historic Mecca Apartment Building for the construction of Mies van der Rohe’s Crown Hall in the 1950s. Photographs of protest meetings are described but not shown: the computer-generated figure of an African American dancer, posing motionless on a confined stage, lends a visual presence to textual allusions to sculpture and dance. Central to the entire presentation is a set-piece digital animation, the reconstruction of a classroom with an architectural model on a table, based on Mies’s glass and steel construction. This machine-like architectural space gradually unfolds, becoming a larger, identical room, in which the building we previously occupied is now the model on the table—an endless regression that ominously reflects the relentless, impersonal expansion of technology.

Burgin envisions disturbing and destructive forces at work in modernism. In Mirror Lake, design is embodied in images of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Seth Peterson Cottage in Wisconsin, some taken by Burgin himself, but others borrowed or constructed—hybrids less solidly grounded in the “that has been” of Roland Barthes. Texts recounting the suicide of the cottage’s builder enhance their uncanny quality. Digitally abstracted backgrounds of lake and sky create a sense of displacement, as the designed environment penetrates the natural landscape and suggests the work of subconscious forces. Highly edited ripples on the lake seem artificial, as though borrowed from an Alex Katz painting, and an apparently still image of a woman unexpectedly breathes: it’s a clip from an Andrei Tarkovsky film and thus several steps removed from everyday life.

Rather than focus on the specifics of place, Burgin adopts a surrealist stance and introduces other unrelated materials, challenging viewers to follow his chain of associations: an encounter on a train in New Mexico, a pan across an empty train compartment that punctuates the presentation more than once, and a spectacular desert landscape with a naked man leaning against a dramatically tilted rock. This last is a sensationalized media image of the American West more akin to those in his early work. The raked sand in the foreground, however, suggests that this is really no desert but an enlarged Japanese rock garden, a digital fusion of wilderness and design. The incongruity of such images – in contrast to the straightforward narration of the texts – invites speculation. The nudity of rock and figure provides a field for projection. Is this global warming? A structuralist could generate a grid of binary oppositions: women identified with life, nurture and restoration, and men with the desert, design and pilotless drones. But the point is not so much to decode as to play. The endlessness of the loop eliminates any closure, encouraging extended viewing and reinterpretation, a process akin to culture itself.

Burgin once dismissed painting as anachronistic, but his new work has much in common with painting of the academic tradition, with its literary and philosophical allusions and polished craftsmanship. His symbol-laden boulder recalls images from video artist Peter Campus’s early digital collages, which combined scanned objects, texts and manipulated landscapes with overtones of melodrama and allegory. Campus has since developed a more contemplative flow in his slow-paced videos, which recall the painterly engineering of Georges Seurat. One wonders if Burgin could develop more purely visual content, perhaps extending the sequence of photos of foliage in Mirror Lake, for example? Is there room for the visionary visual montage that Stan Brakhage employs in his mythopoeic films? Burgin’s open-ended loops offer a framework for further elaboration—perhaps even collaboration.

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Beat Generation: New York, San Francisco, Paris at the Centre Pompidou, Paris (June 22 – October 3, 2016)

Beat Generation: New York, San Francisco, Paris, surveys a far-flung group of over 80 artists, centered on William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, who met in 1944 in New York City. It’s a literary group distinctly impatient with the printed text, and even language itself; they favor collective experience, collaboration across media, improvisation, and performance. Ginsberg presented “Howl” in a famous public reading, while Burroughs used texts for random “cut-ups”. Language migrates from one medium to another in the immersive, cave-like space of the show’s central gallery, where curator Philippe-Alain Michaud, assisted by film scholar Rani Singh and artist/curator Jean-Jacques Lebel, have orchestrated a comprehensive installation of original materials that encourage reflection on the interplay of European and American modernism.

Unlike a recent exhibition at the Orangerie dedicated to poet Guillaume Apollinaire, which focused on writers and artists in early 20th- century Paris, this one emphasizes travel across continents, fueled on a mix of Transcendentalism and Surrealism, on Walt Whitman and Arthur Rimbaud. There’s an appealing narrative, with a French inflection, to this voyage of marginalized individuals, alienated from a conformist society, who, as America expanded its world influence, turned to Antonin Artaud and Apollinaire, and insisted on immediate, lived experience. They explored film and audio recording and new methods of composition in the “open field”, and questioned consciousness itself through meditation and drugs. The journey ends, appropriately, in Paris circa 1960, at the seedy “Beat Hotel”, where Ginsberg composed “At the Grave of Apollinaire” and Burroughs’ visionary works took form, in the context of the group’s ongoing struggles with poverty, mental illness and addiction. There’s inspiration to be found in their vision, in these times of renewed threats to the individual, but also enough darkness to recall the warning of poet Charles Olson, who observed that we revere Whitman because he gives us hope, but that Melville is “the truer man”, who gives us “America, all of her space, the malice, the root.”

To paraphrase Olson again, “SPACE” is the “central fact” of the Beat Generation, with Jack Kerouac’s typewritten scroll of On the Road extending like a highway for 120 feet across the main gallery. Typed over three weeks on sheets of tracing paper, taped together so as to obviate changing pages in the machine, it’s a performance as much as a text, configured here as a sculptural installation. Anonymous film clips of the American road are projected on screens suspended overhead, while piped-in recordings of vintage blues and jazz intermingle with the hum of film projectors to create a buzzing, flickering field, a realm of surrealist suggestion, in which visitors are encouraged to wander. Displays of vintage typewriters, microphones, and tape recorders ground it all in the material context of cultural production.

Candid, hand-captioned photos taken by Ginsberg himself punctuate the exhibition, insinuating the poet’s personal magnetism and blurring the line between work and documentation. Photos selected from Robert Frank’s famous cross-country road trip, The Americans, supply a gritty visual context for Kerouac’s text, reinforcing the journalistic intensity of his verbal snapshots of marginalized characters. In a neighboring alcove, Frank’s 1959 film, Pull My Daisy, a whimsical collaboration narrated by Kerouac under the direction of Abstract Expressionist painter Alfred Leslie, features Ginsberg and others in a casual sequence of daily interactions. The improvisatory structure of jazz provides an important model for this informal art, and gestural painting seems a sideline for a number of writers, including Kerouac and Julian Beck, whose Living Theater exemplifies the group’s transgressive, participatory spirit.

If there’s innocent exuberance to Kerouac’s hunger for experience, to the freedom of “having nothing”, the cathartic incantation of Ginsberg’s “Howl”, drawn from Blake and Rimbaud, and from his own experience on the road and in a mental hospital, provides a counterpoint. Here, one can listen to Ginsberg himself reading the poem, examine his original manuscript with handwritten revisions, or interact with the words more directly by reading aloud a phonetic transcription, broken down onto some 200 posters created by contemporary artist Allen Ruppersberg. Neighboring displays of tabloid headlines from the 1950s featuring the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg evoke the era’s hysteria over communism and fears of nuclear war, traumas that can’t help but resonate with current anxieties in Europe.

In an inspired contrast to the dark activity of the opening gallery, the curators have dedicated the north gallery and its panoramic view of Montmartre to a reading room. Among its bookshelves, a lone monitor features Ginsberg being interviewed by Lebel, while the silent presence of the city at large animates the room in a flood of natural light. Combining intimacy and spectacle, it informally celebrates the wonder of everyday life and the possibility of enlightenment, anticipating Michael McClure’s ecstatic “Peyote Poem”, reproduced in a neighboring gallery: “I KNOW EVERYTHING! I PASS INTO THE ROOM.”

In side galleries, we follow the group from New York to California, where they establish affiliations with a rich culture of artists and writers, including McClure and Zen environmentalist Gary Snyder. A film clip shows McClure reading poems to a lion at the zoo, engaging with his animal body, while Bruce Conner’s mural-scale film clips of mushroom clouds from nuclear tests ironically conflate American expansionism and hallucinogenic drugs. There’s much art based on clipping and splicing, including the intricate “paste-ups” of Jess, which integrate science, art and myth. Wallace Berman’s collages using early xerox technology underline connections between collage and montage that emerge dramatically in Stan Brakhage’s Desistfilm (1954), with its opening credits hand scratched onto celluloid and compressed editing that develops tensions in an informal gathering, not unlike the one recorded more digressively in Pull My Daisy. A similar hallucinatory intensity animates the magic lantern effects of Harry Smith’s color animations, noteworthy in an exhibition that’s largely black and white, which extend Apollinaire’s concept of Orphism by coordinating shifts in visual patterns to music.

Of the three central figures, Burroughs took longer to establish his literary career, migrating to Mexico and Latin America in search of hallucinogenic plants, and sojourning with writer and ethnomusicologist Paul Bowles in Tangiers, before rejoining Ginsberg and other poets in Paris. A dilapidated bed evokes the seedy atmosphere of the “Beat Hotel”, where he and British writer Brion Gysin developed the “cut-up” – a technique of slicing up texts and randomly recombining the pieces that helped him complete Naked Lunch. For Burroughs, who regarded language as a virus, it was important to rid the body of its control. The cut-up, which Ginsberg saw as an extension of Cézanne’s process of construction with patches of color, also generated a wealth of visual material, combining photography, painting and calligraphy, that culminated in the “Dream Machine” – a rotating light box informed by primitive cinema and by the orgone theories of Wilhelm Reich, designed to activate the electrical energy of the body and generate a hypnotic state in which light could transcend language altogether.

In Paris, Ginsberg sought out Apollinaire’s grave at Père Lachaise and wrote his tribute to the poet who coined the term “surrealism” and gave verses visual form in “Calligrammes” – bringing an American movement back to its European roots. Curator Lebel, who was a member of the group at that time, even introduced the Americans to Marcel Duchamp, envisioning a fusion of European and American avant-gardes; the writers were drunk, but Duchamp, who welcomed the rawness of America in his assault on high culture, was not put off, even as Ginsberg kissed his knees and Gregory Corso clipped off his tie. Beat Generation responds to American scruffiness and homegrown mysticism with a similar generosity of spirit. World-weary Europeans attuned to Baudelairean irony might respond more to Andy Warhol’s reduction of transcendence to celebrity and commodification than to Ginsberg’s raw hunger for life. But by bringing French ideas back to Paris fully embodied in American space and popular culture, this exhibition inspires visions of a Whitmanesque merger. There’s a bracing freshness to the abrupt word juxtapositions of Ginsberg’s “Apollinaire”, while the harshness of Burroughs’ bodily imagery recalls us to the unkempt power of everyday experience.

The post Space is the Central Fact: The Beats at the Centre Pompidou appeared first on artcritical.

Hearne Pardee: I suggest we take a fresh look at the paintings on view — not just as a transition to the figurative work, or in terms of their historical context, but in terms of what stands out for you in this decade of painting.

Writing at the time, Bill Berkson commented on their “luminous” grays, which he compared to the “barrel of a gun” or to the “luster of old black and white movies.” Something that strikes me is a loosening up around the edges that takes over in the 1960s — Guston doesn’t work all the way to the border, so that the visual field is up for grabs along with everything in it; he no longer relies on the frame, or the “window” of the Renaissance painters he studied. Image and field are mutually dependent. Guston seems immersed in the midst of things, constantly looking for a piece of firm ground — a process he seems to have to undertake all over again with each painting. At the same time, there’s a progression underway.

Katherine Bradford: In addition to the “loosening up around the edges” that Hearne mentions I noticed that in the final galleries you also see amazing examples of a painter painting wet into wet, with what Roberta Smith in her review called “fat luscious strokes.” That a painter could take his palette of black, pink, white and red and mush it all together with no off-putting muddy areas earns my respect and awe. We don’t see many painters trying a wet into wet technique — I can think of Georg Baselitz, Andre Butzer and Bendix Harms — but none of them achieve the shimmering surfaces of these Gustons. Looking at the paintings, I imagined his brushes sitting in cans of medium and never washed clean. The brushes seemed loaded with the perfect mixture of paint and whatever it is he is using to keep things shiny. These aren’t the tools of a palette painter, these are the tools of an alchemist.

Jennifer Riley: Right Katherine, I was thinking about other work of the same time — work that Guston no doubt would have known or seen, in addition to his deep investment in the art of the past, especially Joan Mitchell’s pastels and paintings before her move to France. Her lines, marks, strokes and daggers retain their chromatic clarity, while the image, as in Guston’s work from 1960 forward, is drawn away from the frame edge. Her broad range of color is masterfully clear and, most often, only momentarily, minimally and intentionally muddied but poignantly mixed. Her surfaces, at times dry, evoke an entirely different inner panorama — minus the juicy shimmer that we see in the work of Guston in this exhibition.

David Humphrey: I like what Jennifer and Katherine are saying about Guston’s mark-making. It feels like he is stirring up a drama between black and white with psycho-mythic overtones. The turbulent field, or grey habitat, comes into being out of black and white’s struggle to mix with each other while the compressed tangle of isolated black protagonists are arrested at a moment just before or after a dissolution into the viscous surround. I think black, for Guston, is redolent with Morandi and de Chirico’s metaphysics of shadow; objects cast a dark double with substance and the power to disturb.

Hearne’s observation that Guston doesn’t “work all the way to the border” is worth talking about. Maybe the whiteness of the canvas has a radiant purity that casts the whole procedure of painting as a sustained besmirching; a mucking up of the clean thing. But in some ways the relation of the black blobs to their world is like the shaggily edged painting to the primed canvas. Guston muscularizes doubt to tell a story about flawed or incomplete personhood woven into a world made of the same slippery stuff. Could we call these works auto-metaphors? Representations of themselves?

David Rhodes: Hearne, I think in these 1960s paintings Guston is already beginning to question, self-critically, what is to be done about the issues of composition and content on the level of basic forms. Letting the brush marks appear as process and exposing the ground on which they are painted is Cézanne’s solution to the problem of transition to edge in a painting made up of relational parts. The interlocking of forms on the brink of dissolution recalls Morandi. It’s interesting that both Morandi and Guston were steeped in Quattrocento painting, in particular Piero della Francesca. The oddness of Piero’s outline of ambiguous positive/negative spaces is present in late Guston and Morandi paintings. For artists used to Guston’s painted fields of variegated marks, the confrontation with associative shapes like skulls/faces/heads during the ‘60s must have been as much liberating as confounding. The more form-driven Guston got, the more articulate and urgent his painting became.

Stephen Ellis: To me, Guston began as a moralist, became a sensualist under the influence of Monet and AbEx, and ended by synthesizing something original from the two—a sensual, ironic moralism, less didactic and more grounded in personal experience than the generalized outrage of his youthful paintings. The artist I associate with Guston’s early ambition is the angry, accusatory Goya of The Third of May, the one closest to the spirit of the late figurative work is the funny and unflinching Beckett of Krapp’s Last Tape, and the spirit-guide of Guston’s abstract paintings of the ‘60s is clearly Giacometti — the painter. The similarity between Giacometti’s portrait heads, dense and light-absorbing, like black holes embedded in luminous gray space, and Guston’s weirdly sentient matrices of black and gray is unmistakable. The flurries of background strokes in Giacometti’s portraits also trail off as they approach the edges, just as Hearne describes in Guston’s paintings. And the bleakness and sense of loss in Giacometti’s work is much closer to the looming, ominous feeling in Guston’s ‘60s paintings than the stillness of Morandi or the exuberance of Mitchell.

Of course Guston was interested in formal issues, but I think only as a means to an end — that end being the darker, more personal and powerful expressive language he searched for in the ‘60s. The proof of that goal is the novelistic world where the search ended, a place you’d be more likely to trip over Gregor Samsa than find yourself contemplating the eternal present with Morandi or mourning the fugitive present with Giacometti.

Riley: Stephen, I may be reading into the Gregor Samsa analogy too literally, but I see Guston as a body making a painting — trying to figure out how to move forward from his ‘50s paintings, where a main problem he addresses (to my mind ) is “surface.” His was a sustained engagement with the surface, challenged by the possibility of being both inside and outside of the painting at the same time. I also see the shift from “moralist to sensualist” as a natural development as he matures through lived exposure to a whole gang of artists — Kline, de Kooning, Newman, Rothko, the rise of Minimalism — in addition to new commercial potentials. He was interested in making paintings not products, trying to make a new “real” world.

Pardee: We should also recall the huge cultural and political shifts of the 1960s.

Gaby Collins-Fernandez: I’ve been trying to imagine what it felt like for those to be the last things Guston had made, the freshest and newest! Very intense and strange.

Looking at them, I got the sense of someone trying to make emotional room in painting from physical, spatial terms that weren’t available in the dominant painting discourse of the time. I read the shadows and the way the forms feel heavy and connected to gravity in terms of a desire to understand forms in relation to recognizable physical-causal dynamics — to make abstract, all-over mark-making compete with gravity, light, and the kinds of environmental conditions that stuff, matter, and people have to deal with, outside of blank, white surfaces. A lot of those early forms inside the grays look like they have feet.

Even though there is a lot of gestural energy in the work, I see Guston’s marks in relation to drawing, to drafting both the dimensions and air of this new emotional space. That’s also a connection to the early Renaissance, and the sense that those artists were visualizing a new operating concept of space in painting through drawn perspective.

There is certainly an openness about doubt in these works that runs contra the more heroic mid-century narrative about painting. Focusing on doubt and dependency exposes “the autonomy of the art object” as an ideological delusion: it forces the artist to account for art within existing social dynamics in which very few things exist independently from everything else.

Humphrey: What I think is so exciting about this show is the way Guston articulates and celebrates incipience, the potential for a thing to come into being. He lays out the basic terms that will later be used to more emphatically name things, but things still haunted by a prior incipience. The blunt forms that after 1968 become books, canvases, shoes or heads, bear the memory of and often slip back into undifferentiated muck — or sometimes, after some scraping or smushing, an entirely different object. The habitats emerge tactilely, the way one imagines a space by means of blind groping. I like thinking of his work as ham-handed — that corporeal seeing is performed through touch and makes cured meat of our paws. His work argues that we are made of the same stuff as the things we make or consume.

Pardee: Is there a particular painting that stands out for you? Katherine mentions alchemy, and there’s a great 1960 painting called Alchemist with a stew of colors. Path II, also from 1960, seems to subdue the color interactions into blue and red, dominated by gray, after which the black and white take over. These are among my favorites.

Riley: Ah! Very hard to pick just one painting as a favorite from this exhibition. I suppose if the building were on fire I’d try to drag May Sixty-Five (1965) with me. This painting has a large rectangular black form coming to rest off-center, lower right , upon a cloudy zone of pink, red and grey. The color in the lower foreground seems to be filtered through the black form as it passes through to the upper central ground evoking a sense of air, time, distance and compression simultaneously. The roundish, pink form nestled to the left of the black rectangle opens a door that hints at looming inchoate emotions and a potential narrative. The tautness of that relationship, the slippery light and shimmering, icy grays, enchant me.

Pardee: That one seems like a still-life. I like the small red dot showing through the veil of gray — both behind and in front. A lot seems to have to do with just the contrasting directions of the brush-strokes — the compact black ones opposed to the vigorous gray “erasing marks” just above it.

Riley: I didn’t see still life at all — but I could stretch to go there — the scale, marks and forms cued me toward reading it as a non-objective abstraction with landscape referents. Do you see Guston at this time also still struggling against his natural abilities that make elegant and beautiful paintings?

Pardee: I see more struggle in the earlier works in the show — the colored shapes seem tortured, overworked. The release from color that leads into gray seems to help open up the process of painting itself. Here he seems comfortable to me — there’s elegance in the variations of brushstrokes and the adjustments of scale. Perhaps he’s getting too comfortable in this sort of balance between field and form?

Your reference to landscape as opposed to still-life gets into a metaphorical dimension — relations of similarity, of what it looks like. I think there’s also a strong element of metonymy at work in these paintings, or relationships of meaning set up by proximity — how brushstrokes interact and suggest meanings by contrasts of direction and scale. Finding meaning through the sort of blind groping Gaby and David Humphrey describe.

Rhodes: Proximity and metonymy play vital roles, particularly in the 1960s paintings. Here, for example, in Position I (1965), the white of the primed canvas is the third tone in a scale of white to black, and contributes to the light of the painting. The spatial quality of so much manipulated paint simply runs out, appearing as just an accumulation of brush marks toward the outer edge of the physical support. Each facet is in relation to the other, its suggestion of representation not undermining its existential impact, but rather amplifying it. By the time Guston leaves for Rome in 1970 the paintings and drawings are a clear reflection on his environment. The drawings here, though enigmatic and fragmentary, still attach to a seen environment more than the paintings, which of course was soon to change.

Ellis: Honestly, I don’t have a favorite painting in the Hauser & Wirth bunch. I enjoy them more as an ensemble from which one or another emerges as you move through the show. That’s a function of the open-endedness of the paintings, one of my favorite aspects of them. Of all Guston’s work, these are the ones with the most “negative capability” in the Keatsian sense, the most ambiguous and immanent. Your reading of them from portrait or figure to still life or pure abstraction is constantly shifting as your attention moves back and forth from the marvelous surfaces to the images the surfaces form. There’s a quality of being in the moment in these paintings that’s different from the more resolved images of the later work. The strokes, as everyone points out, are alive—not merely in a formal way, but mysteriously as a psychic presence, a physical record of the hand moving in thought. You can’t fake that transmutation of the inert matter of paint into the gossamer stuff of thought, and when it’s real, it’s magic.

Humphrey: My favorite painting in the show changes at every turn. I love the determined contingency of all of them, as though each decision was a response to the question “what if?” I’m with him when he decides to completely exclude color, then around the corner a rare green surprises. Pink hovers from the margins or beneath, sometimes fleshy, sometimes crepuscular. Blue reminds us that these are picture spaces, haunted by the outdoors.

Collins-Fernandez: The painting I’ve looked at most since visiting the show, in reproduction, is Fable II (1957) which ended up clarifying Guston’s transition in terms of internal organization as well as style. In that small painting, colors become forms that are undefined but open to association. I can read those forms as a mask, a city-scape, a still life, but I don’t have to — they lend themselves to interpretation around kinds of groups without making claims to specific genre or subjects. The composition, in terms of how the forms hold together, is close to the ’50s, “shimmery” abstractions. But the impetus to shift is there. In the later and sparser black and gray paintings from the show, the shapes that appear (often singularly) are more definite in having a kind of objectness/identity. There’s a big difference, which may be best characterized grammatically: in Fable II, forms emerge which function like adjectives, inflecting one another, the general composition, and possibilities of signification, whereas by the time Guston makes paintings like Position I (1965) and Portrait I (1965), the forms which appear are more like nouns, concrete objects with a kind of “person-place-or-thing”-ness.

In an extension of the comments around metonymy, I would argue that in the mid-60s, Guston is moving from the more metonymical (part of x might=y) meaning-structure of the earlier abstractions to a structure more based on metaphor (x=y), which will then carry through to the kind of assertive, definitional vocabulary of the drawings.

Pardee: Just isolating one shape is already a move in the direction of representation, eliminating what you call the “adjectives.” It goes back to your earlier remark about Guston’s lending weight and dimension to abstract forms, much as the artists he admired in the Renaissance did for the space of the world around them. There’s a grammar and phenomenology of painting.

Bradford: Hearne mentions the “tortured” look of Guston’s earlier paintings, which is apt because it evokes the “doubt” Gaby mentions, without the satisfying search more evident in the later galleries. Hearne also remarks that it seems Guston cannot find his forms until he lets go of color and turns to gray paintings with black rock-like forms. In the earlier group, I see the color egging Guston on to give us more line than form, as if he could not bring himself to admit to colored “stuff” only colored “mark.” I think of Christopher Wool here, also an obsessive master of “erasure,” especially Wool’s most recent gray/black/white paintings, because I perceive them as not containing “doubt.” They look more like the presentation of an experiment whereas I see Guston performing in the moment, truly searching for something that in fact does not appear, and this gives his work the pathos that we find so endearing.

Pardee: Do the drawings shed light on what’s going on in the paintings? Are they more metaphorical?

Collins-Fernandez: The more I think about the drawings, the more I see them as a relational alphabet, bringing the viewer from dot to line to window to squiggle. There seems to be no hierarchy; a cluster of lines has the same importance as a building or as a rough rectangle. The consistency of Guston’s line in width and character is not about expression, per se, but seemingly about a kind of existential attitude. The works carry ideas about doubt, etc., in the line, rather than in some explicit drama. It seems that this idea about line comes directly from the way that Guston builds up the surface in the works in this show — ie, from painting: the line in the drawing compresses all of the energy of his earlier fields into one single mark. The effect is of an infiltrating tone, a “show-don’t-tell” kind of move, which underscores his late-style relationship to comic illustrations.

Humphrey: The drawings are unburdened by his roiling brushstroke fields. They don’t emerge out of wetness but crawl directly across the clean expanse of the store-bought paper with slug-trail deliberateness. The drawings have a show-off audacity, perhaps fueled by minimalist permissions, but also as caricatures of that younger movement’s severe reductions. I imagine Guston chuckling, followed by a feeling that this might be the royal road to new freedoms.

Bradford: Are the drawings more confident than the paintings — with David’s “show-off audacity” — or are they evidence of an artist going back to ground zero, needing to reset himself after having lost his belief in the “roiling brushstroke fields”? That he left each one so spare says to me that he’s not chuckling at all, he’s testing all that’s gone before and coming up with very short answers.

Humphrey: Of course I am projecting, imagining that Guston’s drawing of a right angle is a precursor to his later drawing of Richard Nixon. His “short answers” surely lay out the constituent elements of the work that will be made one year later or less.

Pardee: Maybe we should step back now and look at the larger historical context, including Guston’s relation to the contemporary scene: what sort of context does the history that this show brings to light provide for other shows currently on view in New York? I’m thinking of Gerhard Richter, who ranges from abstract to representational, or Nicole Eisenman, who develops vernacular narratives, just to pick two extremes. Or you might want to pick up on some other topic suggested in the comments that hasn’t received its due.

Ellis: Looking at the historical context, I’d like to talk about an issue that’s come up once or twice—the notion of the “dominant discourse” of that time, something that’s often misunderstood. The idea of a confident, triumphalist Greenbergian discourse dominating American painting from the early ‘50s on conflates several generations and schools of artists in a way that from my memory of the period is simply false. The older AbEX artists — specifically de Kooning and later Pollock rebelled early against Greenberg’s obsession with self-referentiality — de Kooning with the “Women” and Pollock with his later figurative work. With their talk of philosophical and mythopoeic themes (Newman, Rothko) or erotic, landscape and other-worldly references, it’s hard to see how they would accept Greenberg’s ideal of formal autonomy.

By the late ‘60s, Judd’s ideas were far more fashionable than Greenberg’s, and the Abstract Expressionists, especially the older ones — with the exception of Pollock, who served as a conceptual model for non-painting practices a-borning — were widely seen as irrelevant. Like Guston, they were closer to Surrealism and Existentialism than to Greenbergianism. They saw their work as engaging broad and fundamental questions of existence. Guston talked of many things in his Studio School visits. He had certain subjects and certain artists he returned to obsessively—Morandi, Ensor, Piero, de Chirico, Kafka. I can’t remember him ever mentioning Greenberg. I doubt if he ever thought about him, except maybe, if asked, to harrumph, “Greenberg, that asshole?” The Studio School circa ’68–75 and the other painting programs Guston taught in were very fringe places. Not fashionable, not even close. I know he was bitter about having to teach so much after such a long career and bitter, I think, at being regarded by the young art world as an eminence very grise.

The point I’m making is that the history of their times: poverty, immigration, two wars, the Depression, lack of recognition, political strife (Spain, Communism in the ‘30s, McCarthyism) — did not create a bunch of triumphalist Greenbergians; it created a bunch of skeptical, tenacious, idiosyncratic, ambitious idealists — an alarming number of whom committed suicide, either actively or passively. So, let’s separate these two world of experience and of ideas. Maybe Olitski, Poons, and Louis can be understood under the sign of Greenberg and fit into the Mad Men moment of the Pax Americana, but the Abstract Expressionists in general and Guston in particular do not belong there. Nothing could be clearer proof of that than his late work, which is not a departure from Greenberg, but a separate track altogether.

Rhodes: I agree with Stephen’s remarks about Greenberg. A great writer whose influence was a strand, certainly almost only a New York strand, not a European one. Europe post-World War II was a wreck, very unlike America at the same moment. There was an extreme skepticism of any dogma. I think Guston shared this; as he said, “I’m sick and tired of all this purity.” His use of the vernacular idiom of comic strips and political cartoons was seen as kitsch by many abstractionists, Greenbergian or not. Were his early paintings also seen as Soviet Socialist Realism as opposed to American abstraction during the Cold War period? In any case, the figuration emerging in this exhibition was seen as a betrayal. Here, Guston works with ambivalence between formal abstraction and objectification.

Pardee: Perhaps with a nod to Greenberg’s concern for the medium, the show is subtitled “Painter,” and it appeals to painters in particular, both for Guston’s engagement with the material but also for his unabashed enthusiasm for the painters he admired — I recall a story I think he told of meeting a Russian man at the Accademia in Venice; they shared no language, but just shouted out “Rembrandt!” “Giotto!” “Caravaggio!” etc. Seeing these paintings today raises the perennial question of painting’s place. What does it mean for Hauser & Wirth to devote such a lavish show to painting? Has painting become spectacle?

Riley: I find that the art world of our context is not unlike this transitional phase in Guston’s career. The coin of the realm, so to speak — Painting — is also (once again) surprisingly not dead. It is very much alive amid increasing competition for art world attention. Painting today has expanded way beyond the barriers of Guston’s time — as Stephen mentioned the plurality of expressive forms and approaches in painting. The spirit of Guston’s work of this period may be may be our own epoch’s true character.

I also think it’s not surprising that this exhibition is here in NYC, which is an absolutely unique creative environment in all of the world, where the constant influx of new talent, and blunt market forces, generate ideas, innovation and new approaches. That painting garners such attention today in both its pure or conventional form and as part of multi-platform work is one reason why I believe H&W found it an opportune time for this exhibition. Another might be the profusion of recent scholarship, such as Peter Benson Miller’s terrific exhibition and catalogue of 2010, at the Museo Carlo Bilotti in Rome, “Philip Guston, Roma,” focusing largely on Guston’s works on paper made during his return to Rome in ’70–71 after the Marlborough show. It was at that time Guston developed original images fusing the vestiges of antiquity, Roman Gardens, Fellini films, Piero and De Chirico underscoring his lifelong attentiveness to Italian culture and art that we sensed in these ’60s paintings and which play out subsequently in oeuvre. Now seems a perfect time to take stock in this earlier, less known and often misunderstood period of Guston’s work. Also to reassess his legacy just a few years after the centennial of his birth in 1913 and to coincide with the release of the revised edition of Night Studio: A Memoir of Philip Guston by his daughter, Musa Kim.

Bradford: Just to add a footnote to Jennifer’s excellent answer to Hearne’s question about why a lavish Guston show now, I’d say there are a good number of leading painters who want to speak to Guston with their work and are probably quite pleased when he’s mentioned as an influence. At Nicole Eisenman’s current New Museum show the painting Selfie (2014) shows a large Guston head with a giant eye looking into an iPhone screen. Both Amy Sillman and Dana Schutz are frequently mentioned in the same sentence as Guston and were part of a show that Steven Zevitas mounted last summer in Boston called the “The Guston Effect.” It had work by 45 mostly New York painters and every single one (of us) were happy as can be to be included.

Rhodes: Certainly Guston argues for a continuity with the day to day world through painting, but with no conceit about actually knowing exactly what that might mean. The corporeality we share with objects and the back and forth between what we see and what we touch and how we feel about that seems to be a two way street.

However unfashionable it may sound, it’s fine, though very unnerving, to not know what you are painting, to forget an imposed narrative and let the content assert itself retrospectively through dialogue with the painting process. Paintings should be smarter than the artist, or what’s the point? Guston is a difficult act to follow; no one paints like he did because his paintings are the results of his personal endeavor. Christopher Wool is an interesting case as he continues with gestural painting without resorting to mimicry, re-coining this form of abstract painting in his own voice. The automatism implicit in Guston is there in Wool also, and in both artists it’s only part of the story, but a vital one.

I’d like to conclude by quoting from the discussion between Berkson and Guston in 1964:

Berkson: “Much modern painting has denied that the ‘eye’ is the receiver and judge of painting. Delectation is an afterthought. Paintings as realized thought… They are perceived intellectually.”

Guston: “It seems to me the only thing you can ask is: ‘What are you doing?’ ‘What is it?’ and ‘When are you finished?’ To find out ‘what’ is the only thing you can do.”

Guston is proposing and working through an ontology of painting.

Pardee: We could add “ontology” to Gaby’s idea of Guston’s building up a visual structure for abstract “things” and a grammar to go with it — a sort of phenomenology of painting.

Collins-Fernandez: I’ve been thinking a lot about a certain distance I felt from the show. I love Guston’s work, and felt the richness looking at the works individually, but also felt a bit unsettled by it — and I thought this conversation could be a good place to lay some of these thoughts out a bit.

My first impulse when looking at the show was to think of it historically, more a document of Guston’s evolution than immediately relevant. Not just because the distinction between abstraction and figuration is played out, but because Guston’s invention, creating unification through connected material relations, feels removed from my own experience, where materiality dissociates and does not conform with representation.

Like David and David, I find the late works in the show and Guston’s subsequent paintings to be descriptive of a more or less monadic universe. The material bleed between foreground and background in the mid-’60s foreshadows the later life-art blurriness of Guston’s paint and imagery: painter and painting; objects and representations — all are, for better and for worse, inseparable.

Nicole Eisenman (among others who Katherine mentioned in her response) is a good example of a painter continuing to work in this mode of material thinking in relation to technological devices. While looking at Guston’s work, though, I kept thinking about how the kind of continuity between our selves and our images he’s positing would be much more complicated and perhaps fractured in our world of digital avatars and proxies, which serve representational and imagistic functions through largely abstracted (although still material) processes.

The show’s title (“Painter”) establishes a sense of continuity through the practice of painting. While as a painter I am heartened by this, I also find myself comparing the show to Hauser Wirth & Schimmel’s concurrent show in LA of abstract sculptures by women, which they titled “Revolution in the Making.” Rhetorically, these are very different strategies, with the latter evoking rupture, change. I wonder whether the conversation in New York is really furthered by folding Guston into a tradition and the shifts in his paintings into the very occupation of painting, when his breaks and turns through good taste, style, and art history have caused such a long-lasting and fruitful ruckus.

Bradford: Reading through Gaby’s summary statement I got to the last sentence and wondered where she was going to go with it. To end with the word “ruckus” seems perfect.

Pardee: I like “monadic painting” and speculations about technology. I’d be curious to see Guston’s work exhibited in relation to other contemporary artists.

Riley: We use tradition to help us invent, not to maintain it. That’s why I find an advantage in placing Philip Guston in the tradition he was working in, as he simultaneously busted moves and widened the net of painting and practice. Thus, a delightful consequence of debate, permissions, and possibilities is available to scores of artists in all kinds of disciplines, including poetry, sculpture and so on. We cannot help but embrace and express the conditions of our time and one could find Guston’s invention(s) no longer very useful as our problems are different. However, to my mind, as David Rhodes emphasized in his Guston quote, “To find out ‘what’ is the only thing you can do.” Indeed Katherine, what a beautiful ruckus!

Humphrey: It’s true, as Gaby suggests, that Guston’s paintings don’t immediately suggest the fracturing effects of “proxies and avatars.” As an artist I don’t look to him as a guide through the possibilities of techno-virtuality and the unfolding prosthetic imaginary. But his relevance is still determined by how much he moves us or motivates changes in our work, which I feel he does. Guston’s swampy ambivalence matters to me, and tugs with a certain moral gravity at my own anarchic tendencies in the semio-romper room of a computer-inflected studio.

Pardee: So we’ve talked about the “Early Renaissance” of Philip Guston — its philosophical and literary background and its semiology and poetics of materials. What remains is for a museum to revisit his “High Renaissance” and set it in the context of the contemporary artists we’ve mentioned. I’d welcome that opportunity to reconvene our discussion!

Participants — in their own words:

Hearne Pardee [moderator]
I first encountered Guston as a student at the Studio School in 1970, when he gave a slide talk on his Ku Klux Klan paintings, just before setting off for a year in Rome. I subsequently worked with him in a seminar in 1972–73, when he inspired me to undertake large, semi-abstract paintings, setting up a back-and-forth struggle which continues today. For that reason I’m particularly interested in this current show, with its focus on a period when Guston seemed to hold conflicting tendencies in suspension.

Katherine Bradford
Guston revealed himself to me slowly; at first through pictures and then at David McKee gallery. I was living in Maine in the ’70s and traveled to New York to see the shows at McKee. To my eye they looked full blown and masterful. I wanted what he had: a fluid, paint-filled stroke; personal imagery and secret underpainting showing through. My own paintings at that time were small and beige with no personal imagery and no sense of mystery or light.

Gaby Collins-Fernandez
I encountered the mythology around Guston first and then his paintings of Klansmen, and so I’ve carried the idea of him as a “painter’s painter” (endurance) and social artist (stickiness of subject matter to context) with me to all of the work. I’ve always liked the way the work slips from routine into indulgence, whether in brushwork or cigarettes or existential probing. Guston’s focus on habits good, bad, and ugly over taste reminds me to stay accountable to the day in and day out. I aspire to his generous — and self-implicating — sense of humor.

Stephen Ellis
The first Gustons I saw were the “Monet” abstractions of the ‘50s. Later, I ran across the catalog for the 1970 Marlborough show. I hated the paintings! So crude and goofy and slapstick — ugh! I hated them so much I went back to look at the catalog again the next day — and the next and the one after that, until I’d decided these were the only contemporary paintings I was really interested in. the only paintings that seemed to seize the moment by the throat. I sought him at the Studio School; he was by far the most influential painting teacher I ever had.

David Humphrey
In 1974–75 I was a sophomore at MICA. Late Picasso and Max Beckmann emerged as guides to the psychologically charged pictorial imaginary I was eager to inhabit. One day, while trolling the library stacks, I stumbled on catalogs of Guston shows at Marlborough and McKee. I was stunned by work that seemed to be calling from my future. But he was making this now! I spent my junior year at the New York Studio School hoping he would visit, but happy to catch the smell of barely-dry work straight from his Woodstock studio at McKee’s space in the Barbizon Hotel.

David Rhodes
I first saw a substantial group of Guston paintings at the Hayward gallery, London in an exhibition called “New Paintings—New York”; it was 1979. His room of paintings was instantaneously compelling. And the effect of these works increased, I had the thought, “How could anyone have a painting like one of these on their wall at home?” They were so powerful. Both in the imagery, and the way they were painted. I hadn’t seen anything quite like them before. They were nothing like the paintings I was making, and this didn’t matter.

Jennifer Riley
I saw Guston’s work for the first time when I was a student in France, deeply invested in art history and drawing from classical figures, literally. So Guston’s work of that time reminded me a little of Monet — but without images or his color yet — all atmosphere. Later, people started saying they saw Guston and Picasso influences in my blocky, thickly painted shapes. I didn’t think my spirit was in the same place at all, but I was excited, puzzled and unnerved by Guston’s figures, shapes, brutal use of paint and pared down palette.

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January 7 through February 27, 2016
512 West 19th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, (212) 255-5793

Mary Lucier, who has long worked at the intersection of music and the visual arts, weaves together past and present for her current video installations at the Kitchen, which is marking its forty-fifth anniversary with a series of events and exhibitions. Color Phantoms with Automatic Writing commemorates Lucier’s friend and collaborator, composer Robert Ashley, who died in 2014 and whose production with choreographer Steve Paxton, Quicksand, was concurrently featured on the Kitchen’s stage earlier this month. Revisiting works going back to 1971, Lucier draws on editing techniques of layering and displacement to provide an elegant frame for the Kitchen’s celebration of multimedia research.

Lucier literally introduces the Kitchen’s current programs, with a four-channel work in the theater lobby and a more elaborate installation at the entrance to the second floor gallery. Richly furnished with memorabilia, the upstairs entry recreates the waiting room of a psychoanalyst, with plain wooden chairs randomly arranged in front of a projected video of Ashley in his studio. Layering past and present, Lucier inflects this footage with a sense of loss, covering the projection in a luminous scrim of pixillated snow that evokes its distance in time. An oriental rug that once belonged to Dorothea Tanning leads into the adjoining “office”. Here, where the business of analysis focuses on the recovery of the subconscious, more rugs and cushions create a sense of oriental luxury, while the furnishings, modeled on those of Freud’s office, evoke the era of surrealism: a bookcase of esoteric texts, ethnographic artifacts, and artworks by Max Ernst, Tanning’s husband, set psychoanalysis itself in a distant temporal realm.

As though by magic, the viewer can enter and take his or her place on a magnificent leather couch, where a monitor suspended overhead offers entry into a realm of reverie. Composed in 1971 of slides taken from a moving car and layered with slides of black and white TV programs, Color Phantoms uses gradual dissolves to suggest movement, a sense of immersion indebted to surrealism, which she has developed with changing technologies throughout her career. The dialogue of analysis is displaced onto the soundtrack, in which a man’s and a woman’s voices are overlaid; Ashley, who had a mild form of Tourette’s Syndrome, generated the man’s voice from his own involuntary speech – hence the title, Automatic Writing, which conflates his process of music composition with the surrealist technique. He’s accompanied by electronic sounds and by the voice of a woman who translates his words into French. The analyst’s chair is empty (available to the participant). We are taken out of our internal space and encouraged to project our personal histories into the room’s poetic vagueness, transporting the serious work of analysis into a realm of artistic play.

In the downstairs lobby, Trial, a four-channel video, revisits Lucier’s 1974 footage of Ashley in performance with Merce Cunningham and his dancers at Cunningham’s studio. With characteristic openness, Cunningham accepted Ashley’s loosely scripted theater piece, The Trial of Anne Opie Wehrer and Unknown Accomplices for Crimes Against Humanity, as “decor” for his dancers, and welcomed Lucier and her video camera on stage. Through the lens, all is fragmentary, elusive. In a compression of space and time, Lucier directs the camera at a mirror at the end of the studio, in which Ashley and Anne Wehrer appear as reflections, seen from behind; Cunningham and his dancers also appear as reflections, but occasionally cross in front of the mirror. Sound consists of the couple’s indistinct conversation and ambient noise. The woman speaks constantly; they smoke and drink, kiss, and finally end up on the floor, as Ashley falls from his chair and his partner continues her conversation. Lucier moves back and forth from close-up to long shot, but these are projected here side by side, as though occurring simultaneously. The enigmatic austerity of the Cunningham event contrasts with the ornateness of Lucier’s upstairs installation, yet the reworking of old footage in both cases resembles the process of analysis, bringing lost materials to the surface as fodder for current investigation.

Back upstairs, From Minimalism into Algorithm extends this process. A group exhibition created by the Kitchen’s curatorial team, it juxtaposes, among other things, a plate of steel by Donald Judd, a video of Lucinda Childs dancing to Philip Glass’s music, multi-hued mounds built by termites provided with colored sand by Agnieszka Kurant, and labor-intensive paintings of paint made by Paul Sietsema. It proposes that the chance operations of Cage and Cunningham and the repetitive iterations of minimalism can offer a bridge to art in the digital age. Lucier’s story-telling instincts supply a context for this resurgence of primal materials, as she weaves installation, video and sound into personal and collective narratives that stimulate reflection on the Kitchen’s history. At forty-five, it’s become an institution, but, with experimental ambitions intact, it cultivates awareness of the past with an eye out for new possibilities.

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From her outpost at the foot of Geary Street, gallerist Paule Anglim maintained a magisterial presence in the San Francisco art world. Until her death last week in her 90s, Anglim was an anchor. From her beginnings in North Beach in the 1970s through her 32-year occupancy of 14 Geary Street, Anglim invigorated the Bay Area art world, maintaining contact with its roots in the postwar scene while cultivating new talent and nurturing it with input from New York and Europe. Veteran painter Wayne Thiebaud recalls with admiration the way “she kept that gallery going,” while showing “so many interesting artists,” remembering her as very smart and no-nonsense.

Anglim’s exhibitions reflected her wide-ranging interests and friendships with artists, which led her to follow artistic conversations as they developed. Beginning with those associated with the Beats like Jess (Collins), Joan Brown and Bruce Connor, she followed artists who took their engagement with materials in more conceptual directions like James Melchert and Paul Kos, or developed assemblage into installation like Nayland Blake. Shows of New York artists like Louise Fishman and Milton Resnick emphasized pure painting, but she also represented Robert Bechtle, whose photorealist renderings of suburban streets are quintessentially Californian. Perhaps the best way to characterize her taste is that she relished the rich compost of ideas that sustained Bay Area culture.

But painter John Zurier, who worked with her for nearly 30 years, also recalls Paule as “a direct link to older artists such as Picabia and Max Ernst, and the Parisian painters from the ’40s and ’50s like Fautrier, Jean Riopelle, and Joan Mitchell. She loved the art of conversation and was particularly proud of the interview she did with Picabia’s widow. Paule could be cutthroat in business, but she ran the gallery like an old fashioned salon.” Zurier recalls sitting in Paule’s office when she had to take a call. “I asked if she wanted me to leave so she could talk privately. She said no and then picked up the phone and screamed ‘Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you’ and slammed the phone down. She looked up at me with a little smile and said ‘that was a bit much, don’t you think?’” As ceramic sculptor Annabeth Rosen puts it, “She had exquisite manners and sharp wit, both wielded with precision.”

Rosen also recalls Anglim’s deep commitment “to the artist’s dialogue, which she was relentlessly engaged in,” and Zurier emphasizes her constant reading: “She could talk about the poems of John Montague as easily as the latest mystery novel. Paule loved artists and writers, especially poets, and supported Robert Duncan as much as she did Jess, and Bill Berkson as much as Philip Guston.”

The loss of her presence, and of her institutional memory, cuts deeply, at a time when galleries in San Francisco are being displaced by higher rents, and artists lament the financial changes in the art market along with the money-driven culture of the international scene. Anglim represented not just intelligence and cultural breadth, but a rootedness that seems hard to recover.

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Martial Raysse: Rétrospective 1960-2012 at the Centre Georges Pompidou
May 14 through September 22, 2014
Place Georges-Pompidou
Paris, +33 1 44 78 12 33

Martial Raysse’s career falls into two phases. One stars the precocious Pop artist who exhibited in New York and Los Angeles in the 1960s and pioneered the use of neon and video, envisioning an art culture extending from North Africa to Japan. The other features the hermetic figure who abandoned the commercial art scene for a commune, made shamanistic assemblages, and emerged from the political and cultural turmoil of 1968 to reincarnate, under the influence of Marcel Duchamp, Baudelaire’s “painter of modern life.” The more than 200 works in this 50-year retrospective, multi-faceted and leavened with art-historical references, trace an unconventional artistic trajectory.

Raysse, now 78, was shaped early on by art in the South of France. Raised in Vallauris, where his parents were ceramicists, he encountered Jean Cocteau and Pablo Picasso and became friendly with artists in Nice, including Yves Klein and Arman. Responsive to post-war popular culture, the so-called School of Nice offered an upbeat alternative to the angst-driven legacy of war, Existentialism and Abstract Expressionism. Affiliated with Nouvelle Realisme, in the 1950s Raysse explored sculpture and became known for his vitrines displaying objects from the French supermarket Prisunic.

These objects open the exhibition, followed by works from the 1960s that envelop the viewer in sunny, Pop nostalgia: Raysse Plage, an installation featuring sand, beach toys, life-size pin-ups, a neon sign and a jukebox was created for the famous 1962 “Dylaby” exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Raysse is perhaps most identified with his riffs on Ingres’ odalisques, some of which form part of “Made in Japan,” a series based on postcard reproductions of Western masterpieces. Alluding to the French Impressionists’ interest in Japanese prints, they also recall Man Ray’s altered photograph, Le Violin d’Ingres (1924).

Raysse draws less on the industrialized reproduction of Andy Warhol than on Duchamp’s art of ironic appropriation and hermetic imagery. Duchamp introduced readymades in America, and Raysse’s stays in New York and California extended this trans-Atlantic dialogue. He rejected the tormented individualism of abstract painting and shared Duchamp’s ambivalence towards “wet paint.” L’appel des cimes: Tableau horrible (1965) — its neon mountain crest a Pop allusion to the Sublime — makes ironic reference to American landscape painting and to the material density of Abstract Expressionism. Raysse responded to the new intellectual currents of Structuralism and semiotics with ever more simplification and refinement. To free signs from their material context, he reduced his iconic odalisques to cut-out silhouettes and he eventually projected them, along with other symbols, on the inner surface of a desert tent.

That installation, Oued Laou (1971), inspired by a trip to Morocco, also grew from Raysse’s interest in film-making. While TV commercials inspired the satiric humor of his Jésus-Cola (1966), American independent films like Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1963), with its use of appropriated footage and occult images, stimulated Raysse to more-incisive investigations of dreams and myths, of the underlying psychology of media culture. The political failure of the 1968 strikes reinforced this inward turn, inspiring a feature-length film, Le Grand Départ (1972). Chronicling a guru leading his deluded followers on a quest for a better world, it resonates with the improvisation of Godard’s Pierrot le Fou (1969) but features characters inspired by the comics of R. Crumb. Using color negatives and exaggerated contrast, Raysse simultaneously invokes and deconstructs paintings like Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (1830) and Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa (1818-19), blending a dystopian political vision with evocations of childhood innocence.

Childhood merges with psychedelic culture in his subsequent papier-mâché mushrooms, colorful hand-made sculptures and fetishistic assemblages. Raysse went on to pursue hermetic visions in painting, using automatic writing and mixed techniques on paper. Moving to bucolic surroundings in the Dordogne, he extended his references to the ancient Mediterranean, including Bacchus and Carnival, cultivating a broader vision of Pop. Developing an ideal of liberation informed by literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin, who saw in Carnival a reversal of established order, celebration of the body, and visions of universal participation, Raysse took on broader social themes in large-scale painting and sculpture, and he’s created public projects that encourage civil reflection.

The public ambition of his work provides the context for his embrace of painting, which takes on a theatrical character, like the multimedia provocations of his Pop period. While the cinematic mash-ups of Delacroix and Géricault in Le Grand Départ use gestural camera movements and solarized shapes to suggest the Dionysian immersion of Abstract Expressionism, a vision of Bakhtin’s “carnivalesque body,” Raysse emerges from his psychedelic phase with irony intact, along with Duchamp’s ambivalence towards paint. There’s dystopian darkness in Carnival à Périgueux (1992), with its harsh illumination and bursts of neon-inflected color. Utilizing the frieze as an organizing device, with figures isolated against a flat backdrop, Carnival recalls David’s Neo-Classicism, but also the artifice of Berthold Brecht’s anti-illusionist theater. Favoring acrylics and the unconventional medium of distemper, associated with theatrical and commercial painting, Raysse distances himself from oils, from the full-bodied figural tradition of Balthus or Gérard Garouste. His numerous portraits, often recalling movie headshots, seem more fully painted, but the collaged face in Miss Bagdad (2003) suggests that, for him, paint is more like a decorative veneer, applied like make-up.

The retrospective culminates with a 30-foot-long panoramic painting, Ici plage, comme ici-bas (2012), another frieze, in which the transgressive and utopian impulses of the 1960s combine with contemporary social commentary. The image depicts crowds of provocative young girls mingling with men of doubtful character, with bloody rituals in the background. It inspires comparison to Breughel and Bosch, but the awkward, illustrative rendering of the figures and faces, along with the cartoon-like color, place it more in the graphic tradition of German artists like Otto Dix, or, indeed, of Constantin Guys, the Parisian illustrator who inspired Baudelaire’s famous essay. But if the technique is illustrative, it’s worthy of note that Raysse does craft these images himself, unlike other post-Duchampian painters.

Raysse’s ambivalent embrace of popular culture works best in the playful self-interrogation of his films, in which he’s more accessible and his irony less severe. In Mon petit coeur (1995), the lush radiance of Pop persists in a magic-lantern glow, even if the veneer of glamour, enriched by old age and history, renders its images as poignantly remote as the cryptic projections of Oued Laou. But by sustaining the glow of his early works they affirm an urge for transcendence, a luminous vision of pleasure and social participation that supports what Raysse soberly calls his “reasoned optimism.”

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March 22 to May 30, 2014
2540 Barrett Avenue
Richmond, California, 510-620-6772

We value connections to the past, and the Breakfast Group, a loose affiliation of Berkeley-based artists, sustains a conversation that extends back more than fifty years – a living connection to ancestral figures of the Bay Area movement. There’s a certain look to that art, exemplified most prominently by David Park, Elmer Bischoff, and Richard Diebenkorn, but its specific program is hard to define; perhaps that’s why the conversations have continued so long. This show brings together thirty-one artists currently affiliated with the group, and the works themselves, diverse as they are, engage in dialogue, suggesting that enough common ground persists to merit examination.

The Breakfast Group officially traces its origin to regular Friday lunches that painter Elmer Bischoff arranged with his Berkeley colleague Sid Gordin in the 1960s. These, however, merely extended the weekly drawing sessions and conversations that Bischoff held with Diebenkorn and others, before Diebenkorn left the area, when Fridays were a day off from teaching, and life centered around the campus and their nearby studios. When lunch took too much time out of the workday, meetings shifted to breakfast, at 7 am, and the group expanded to include William Theophilus Brown, Erle Loran, Hassel Smith and other artists teaching at Berkeley.

The group developed spontaneously, with no particular artistic agenda beyond a mutual interest in what people had to say.  As it enlarged, eventually to include women, the group moved from one restaurant to another, as establishments closed or their proprietors grew impatient with people sitting so long over coffee.

Bischoff and Loran were cosmopolitan, commenting on art in New York and Europe, but also discussing teaching, new art materials or local politics. Boundaries were fluid – artists like Sid Gordin made both painting and sculpture; gestural forms coexisted with Cubist geometry, along with an undercurrent of Surrealist improvisation. Distinctions between abstraction and representation, while vigorously debated, were not enforced with the same theoretical rigor that Clement Greenberg established back East, and Bischoff’s own work moved from the figure into abstraction during the 1970s.

For Bischoff, breakfast discussions didn’t extend to studio visits; he encouraged debate but kept a more general focus.  When group exhibitions inevitably took place – most notably at the Weigand Gallery in Belmont (1987) and at Holy Names College in Oakland (1991) – they offered a chance to celebrate the group’s diversity, and to examine the networks of artistic affiliations that emerged, like the submerged root system of a tree. So it is with the current show: more diverse than ever, the group can consider how it’s grown and how its present configuration reflects the passage of time. Members seem mildly surprised at how big it’s become and how long it’s been going, fueled simply by interest in one another’s conversation; aware of the history of artists’ groups in Paris cafes and New York automats, they wonder if something significant may have transpired.

Shows have also become reminders of artists no longer with the group – the 1990s were marked by Bischoff’s death in 1991 and Loran’s in 1999, and Jerry Carlin, the member with longest standing in the current group, passed away shortly before this exhibition was installed. Appropriately enough, his two works from the 1980s featured here are transcriptions in oils of old family photographs, which he endows with touches of color and personal inflections that bring their subjects back to life. They exemplify the mixing of media and interest in painterly depiction that inspired both the Bay Area Figurative Movement and other Bay Area artists such as Jess.

For many members, affiliation with the Breakfast Group involves allegiance to the Bay Area tradition that mixes figuration and abstraction. Terry St. John, now perhaps the senior member of the group, continues to create densely worked landscapes and figures, extending the legacy of Bischoff and Diebenkorn. His somber landscapes here suggest the depth of experience that informs his immediate response to a site. Lin Fischer goes further in her response to underlying impulses in her landscape-based abstractions, while Donna Fenstermaker creates more succinct plein-air studies that focus on shadows and reflections.

Interchanges with Europe and New York are integral to Bay Area art, dating back to Erle Loran’s inviting Hans Hofmann to teach at Berkeley in the 1930s. The German artist subsequently settled in New York, where his fusion of color with Cubism informed the rise of Abstract Expressionism. His visits to Berkeley, followed by a donation of money and paintings in the 1960s, enhanced ongoing interactions with New York. Here, Tom Schultz’s restlessly shifting rectangles evoke Hofmann’s grid-like compositions, while Arthur Monroe, another New York transplant, brings the gestural energy of Kline and de Kooning to his overall abstractions. A similar tension animates the drawing of Katie Hawkinson’s tightly compressed ellipses.

Abstract Expressionist impulses also emerge in sculpture, in the bronzes and stacked stones of Patricia Bengston-Jones. Her hand-worked slabs with their markings and suggestions of archaic structures hark back to an era before Minimalism and the “death of the object” upstaged such traditional forms. Joe Slusky’s animated armatures of painted steel and the assemblages of Stan Huncilman also exude a playful, improvisatory energy. Kati Casida abstracts gestural forces into origami-like shapes of aluminum, and that expressionist energy carries over into Marvin Lipovsky’s free-flowing sculptures in seductively colored glass.

Dialogues with New York can be complicated; Sandy Walker’s hybrids of figure and landscape, spare and edgy, speak directly to Bay Area art but originate in his exposure to Hans Hofmann’s legacy at the Studio School in New York. And Foad Satterfield owes the inspiration for his dense, overall landscapes, which amplify the scale and ambition of his Bay Area predecessors’, to his study in Louisiana with New York painter Paul Georges; Georges rejected Abstract Expressionism in favor of work from nature, but instilled in students the energy and ambition of the New York School.

Some women in the group have developed more individualized approaches. Nancy Genn and Edythe Bresnahan, who absorbed Berkeley’s varied influences as students, take them in more contemplative directions, composing with architectural structures on richly layered material surfaces. They share a concern for planar luminosity with Carol Ladewig’s color calendars, whose gridded panels chart the phases of the moon, and with Carl Worth’s hard-edge abstractions.

New technology has filtered into some works, but they remain grounded in individual sensibility. Jeanette Bokhour’s digital prints transform and enhance photos of Marvin Lipovsky’s colored glass sculptures, while those of P.G. Meier dissect and reconfigure everyday objects like pens or forks. Kim Thoman goes a step further by digitally “applying” her abstract paintings onto virtual vessels; she presents them here as large prints, although she is prepared to build them with a 3d printer. In more traditional engagements with high-resolution images, John Friedman photographs Nevada’s arid wastes in the manner of New Topographics, while British artist Anthony Holdsworth paints landscapes on site with a detailed realism reminiscent of his countryman, Rackstraw Downes.

Other works take a post-modern stance, but with personal inflections. Byron Spicer links older Bay Area art to the contemporary media era with his appropriated photos of Arnold Schwarzenegger, rendered in dense mosaics of one-inch square paintings. Genn Toffey’s portraits of historic women overlaid with transparent candy wrappers share in the subtle luminosity of Loren Rehbock’s delicate watercolor renderings of models on patterned backgrounds, which reflect his experience in poster design. The cut metal sculptures of Bruce Chaban recall Frank Stella’s compositions, albeit on a more intimate and playful scale, while Guillermo Pulido’s mixed-media constructions with chairs combine playful formal composition with graphic images of political conflict, reminding us of this important component of Berkeley’s culture.

Organization of this show was spearheaded by Jan Wurm, whose paintings blend Bay Area figuration with simplified renderings of men and women against flat backgrounds, which highlight social interactions, with details of clothing and mannerisms that lend them an ethnographic dimension. Difficult to categorize, they exemplify the combination of high sophistication and improvisatory play that characterizes the Bay Area scene, as do Robert Simons’ hand-painted prints, evocative of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, or Barbara Hazard’s idiosyncratic self-portraits from a mirror cube, which feature animals and multiple self-images in a contemporary version of folk art.

Such is a snapshot of the Breakfast Group today – or Groups, since it is currently split in a dispute between members who prefer Cafe Leila and those faithful to the Vault, a longstanding hang-out, where they maintain an earlier meeting time. The value of conversation and shared information still sustains the expanded group, even as other forces conspire against it. Cuts in education and higher rents have fostered dispersion (Terry St. John offered me comments via Skype from Thailand, where he now maintains a studio for much of the year); artists now commute to teach all over the Bay Area, and few can afford studios close to Berkeley. This has made it more difficult to recruit younger members. A sense of changing demographics and new trends in art lends this event a particularly retrospective and reflective character.

Given the richness of the show, there’s a sense that the gallery system should offer more opportunities for these artists to exhibit; there too, however, rising rents and the invasion of high-tech corporations have created an unfavorable climate. At least for now, weekly breakfasts continue, enacting a cultural form that can be transported and recreated in new locations. Celebration of the Breakfast Group at the Richmond Art Center continues through May, featuring weekly spotlights on selected members accompanied by potluck breakfasts, artist’s talks and workshops.

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October 26, 2013 to January 20, 2014
50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive
Golden Gate Park, San Francisco

David Hockney’s “A Bigger Exhibition” is expansive and multifaceted, driven by Hockney’s unflagging curiosity about picture-making and his relentless rhythm of production.  Organized by the de Young Museum in cooperation with his personal curator, Gregory Evans, it follows up on the artist’s European show, “A Bigger Picture”, and features over 250 works in new and old media, many of large scale, completed since 2002.

Like Claude Monet, Hockney works in series; his paintings address time and optical truth, and they expand into large-scale decorations. Like Monet, he ignores the constraints of monocular perspective, and, just as Monet grew more ambitious over the turn of the past century, so Hockney aims to redefine painting for the digital age. Central to the show is his gallery of four nine-channel videos of Woldgate Woods near his home in Britain (2010-11) – a contemporary Orangerie, where viewers can follow, virtually, the road depicted in many of his paintings. A triumph of technology based in Renaissance optics is here displaced onto thirty-six different “eyes”, allowing the woods to unfold in different seasons in spectacular arrays of moving images. Viewers are forced to enact the multiple scans that make up our stable image of the visual field, much in the way Monet forced them to combine the retinal stimuli that supply its color.

Hockney questions not just the fixation of Western art on the single vanishing point but the look of “reality” it engenders. His “Great Wall”, a project from 2002 reconstructed in the exhibition, juxtaposes color reproductions of European portraits from 1300 to 1900, tracking the emergence of lens-based vision. Documenting painters’ experiments with the concave mirror and camera lucida, Hockney demonstrates the extent of its influence on painting and, he argues, on contemporary mass culture. In his own paintings here, he continues to move away from the photographic finish of his early portraits. Marks and gestures predominate, enlarged and stylized, the legacy of van Gogh, who sought to wrest a personal vision from direct encounters with his subjects.

Hockney likewise bases his work on direct observation, from pocket-size sketchbooks to the large, composite canvases completed on special easels outdoors. They call to mind the more restrained but intensely rendered panoramas of his countryman, Rackstraw Downes, who explores the curvature of the perceptual field with a photographic level of detail, but eschews the camera and technology in general. Hockney, on the other hand, relishes his enlistment of the iPhone and iPad in subverting the Western version of reality. His digital drawings extend the urbane informality and witty observations of his sketchbooks into uncharted electronic territory, where they can be animated and enlarged. Displayed on screens, they’re magically luminous, their dematerialized calligraphy sometimes dancing disconnected from the image, sometimes reinforcing it with emphatic highlights and shadows. Animated, they reveal their successive transformations; the process of revision is open-ended, and the “true” look of the world is always subject to reinterpretation.

Hockney refers to these works as drawings, perhaps to acknowledge their provisional status, yet they also involve their own sensibility, a tension between intimacy and detachment. There’s something similar in Chuck Close’s use of the photograph as a tool in his portraits, employing the gridded image to structure his expressionistic mark making and keep it detached from the sitter. The iPhone portraits bring Hockney closer to his subjects, eliminating the respectful social distance he maintains in his paintings, and they encourage freer mark making, yet when presented on screens or in high-resolution prints, these exploratory marks, the fluid strokes and linear scribbles that can lend them surprising density, remain in the virtual realm. Similar marks in the paintings are more physically immediate, even if they become increasingly stylized in his larger landscapes.

Hockney presents two suites of iPad landscapes enlarged into multi-panel compositions, where they assume a different character, like Alex Katz’s enlargements of his sketches into sharply focused images that celebrate their own artifice. One series of “tree tunnels”, related to the multi-channel video, documents the everyday beauty of nature, but their high-keyed colors, reflective mud puddles and stylized splashes of raindrops seem imported from Japanese animation. In the second series, images of Yosemite veiled in clouds allude to Chinese landscape paintings, and the enlarged gestural marks bring wondrous intimacy to the sublime vistas of the valley. Like both Monet and van Gogh, Hockney finds in Asian art, with its calligraphy, free use of perspective and flat areas of color, a means to liberate painting from Renaissance conventions.

Well before these digital experiments, an exceptional expansion was underway in Hockney’s landscape paintings. Beginning with his return to Yorkshire in 2004, his gestural marks become more urgent and also more differentiated as he tackles roadside vegetation and the close-up articulation of trees. There’s an increasing stylization to the large paintings, as though in groping for the look of the landscape he’s drawing on his experience in set design.  Tree tunnels, compositions with groves of trees in reverse perspective, and fantastical spring blossoms are increasingly regimented, clumped together, with differentiated colors for branches and leaves, and dots and hatches for ground cover and bark.

The largest work in the show, The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 (Twenty Eleven), Version 3, further isolates and stylizes the marks representing different sorts of leaves and flowers. Like the backdrop for a ballet, it also recalls the Symbolist landscapes of Maurice Bernard, as well as Japanese screens and William Morris’s wallpaper designs. Hockney aims for visual immersion through sheer scale, but its flattened shapes still keep us at a distance and don’t engage us as fully in virtual experience as the high-resolution videos.

In terms of immersion, it’s difficult for the hand to compete with electronic media. Technology is enormously seductive, and the receding landscapes of Hockney’s videos generate effects reminiscent of video games; could viewers be offered their own controllers? For all its ambition, Hockney’s exploration of electronic media remains at a relatively basic level, open to the everyday viewer – as opposed, for example, to Peter Campus’s slow-motion renderings of changing, pixillated colors in what amount to digitized neo-Impressionist paintings, or to Bill Viola’s rendering of Pontormo’s “Visitation”.

Engaging the audience is Hockney’s subject in A Bigger Message (2010), a thirty-panel reinterpretation of Claude Lorrain’s “Sermon on the Mount” (1656). Implicit is Hockney’s own sense of mission, his call for “wider vantages”. Everything centers on Christ on the distant crest, around which multitudes assemble for access to the “message”. His progressive re-workings of this painting recall Picasso’s riffs on earlier masterpieces. There’s even a cubist version, but Hockney doesn’t press it very far; he’s more about expansion than about compressing multiple views into a single image. With increasing exaggeration in color, the later versions take the painting in his own post-photographic direction. The scene becomes a stage set, a psychedelic media event, with a vermillion mount, and whimsical fortifications arising in the middle distance. If in Claude’s era, oil painting served to make visions of distant times and supernatural events convincingly real, here painting is absorbed into a larger spectacle.

Coming of age in the heyday of Warhol and popular visual culture, Hockney inhabits a media-saturated world and assumes a populist stance: if there’s no truthful image, just multiple views, our world image must evolve through broad cultural participation. As poet Charles Olson observed, “polis is eyes”.  Rethinking photography opens a field for individual play, and Hockney makes a case for painting, liberated from monocular vision, to assume an important role. Like Dziga Vertov, who created a Cubist cinema in the 1920s, Hockney proposes that we also use technology in a radical democratization of image making. The Jugglers (2012), an eighteen-screen projection near the end of the show, provides a model of playful and inventive social exchange, with its ongoing interplay of random displacements and boundary crossings. Hockney’s appeal, arising from his appreciation of nature’s attractions and his empathy with friends and society, is ultimately sustained through this empowerment of his audience.

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